About NECTAR
NECTAR is a NSERC network of Canada's leading university researchers in human-computer interaction (HCI)
and computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW). Our participants come from 6 universities and are world-class
experts in these fields. Many have also spun off successful technologies and companies.
The NSERC Strategic
Networks Grants Program (formerly the Research Network Grants Program) has
awarded us CDN$5.5M in research funds
to be spent over the period 2004-8. 20% of our funds come from direct industrial
contributions. The full proposal 
summarizes the planned research and the benefits.
Why NECTAR?
The Internet has long provided a network infrastructure for collaboration technologies (often called groupware) that support how people communicate and work together. The recent availability of broadband Internet connections in offices, schools, and homes has led to a huge increase in commercial groupware systems development. Many more innovative and relevant new technologies are just around the corner: displays that cover tabletops or entire walls, high-precision sensing equipment that tracks movement, and interconnections of dozens or hundreds of mobile computing devices. Even though many of these technologies are already available commercially, or are at the very least advanced research prototypes, there are serious problems when they are used to support real group work. Today's groupware is extremely awkward and inefficient when compared with face-to-face interaction. Collaboration technologies typically fail because they do not support the complex and subtle actions and interactions that makegroup work simple and natural in the real world.
For this reason, groupware to date has only a few success stories (e.g., organizational memories such as Lotus Notes, instant messaging, multiplayer games). While often quite crude, these technologies succeed because they make collaboration possible where it was previously impossible. Yet if the full potential of current collaborative technology is to be realized, and if we are to capitalize on innovations to come, researchers must find ways to make all computer-supported collaboration more efficient, productive, and natural.
VISION
The vision of this network is to investigate technological and social issues that will make computer-supported collaboration more efficient, more productive, and more natural. Our goals are:
- To reduce collaboration effort and improve collaboration efficiency in computer-supported cooperative work, based on an understanding of how groups of people really work together;
- To maximize the potential of next-generation interactive technologies for collaborative work;
- To make collaboration at a distance as productive and efficient as working face-to-face, where possible;
- To develop computer-assisted collaboration technologies that augment and surpass traditional ways of working together.